The 2013 Rawlings Gold Glove Award recipients are being rolled out during an hour-long special tonight (8 p.m. ET) on ESPN2. So get your outrage engines started and follow along as the winners are announced position-by-position …

According to statistical analysis provided by fangraphs.com which combines UZR and other factors, these should have been the Gold Glove winners for 2013. For the first time ever, these statistics were provided to voters. The following Gold Glove winners were not in the top three from a statistical basis:
Eric Hosmer, JJ Hardy, Adam Jones, Brandon Phillips, The voters had the information that those four did not deserve their Gold Gloves based on statistics and jumped at least three people. Perhaps everyone here who called out Adam Jones as the 2013 Derek Jeter Reputation Award are on the money. There is little doubt that Mike Napoli did not win the award because voters probably could not come to terms with the fact that this was his first year playing his position on a full time basis. However, the awards actually mean something this year as, for the most part, 14 of the 18 winners were deserving.

It is generally recognized and accepted that statistical analysis of catcher defense remains poor, even by those pioneering the approaches….and that metrics do a poor job for 1B as well, though, much better than for catcher.

I don’t think you have to win an award purely on statistical basis, so I’m ok with this. At least Jeter didn’t win. Other sports like the NBA have a bunch of advance metrics, but it’s only in baseball where you piss people off by wanting to use it as only a part of an answer, rather than the entire basis for doing something.